All in for transactional email delivery — our new approval process

Beginning today, Postmark’s sign up process for new customers will be different. We’ll be manually vetting all new customers to ensure that we continue to provide our customers with the best inbox rates and delivery speeds in the world.

When we started Postmark in 2010, we strongly believed that transactional email was very different from your general email platform. We believed that you need to separate your transactional email from marketing, not only for deliverability, but because the people responsible for it are different in your organization. With transactional email you don’t just look at statistics, you look at logs. Instead of viewing campaigns by the thousands, you troubleshoot delivery problems for an individual user or message. We believed that your application emails are really a piece of your infrastructure, maintained and supported by ops, engineers and product owners, not your marketing team. And we believed that the best delivery will be achieved by pools of shared IPs, where the sender on your left and on your right has high engagement rates and uses good sending practices.

To our great delight, our customers proved us right, and as a result they enjoy the best email delivery in the business. Not only do our emails get to the Inbox, they get there faster than any of the other services out there. This is proven not only in anecdotal stories from folks switching to Postmark, but also with our own internal tooling that tracks delivery across the industry.

And word has been spreading — use Postmark when you care about your emails. Use Postmark for the emails that can’t go missing or come in late. We’re so honored by how many great companies, large and small, have shared in our beliefs and joined us.

This reputation is not easy to uphold, and it is our responsibility to exceed your expectations when it comes to reliability and deliverability of Postmark. As an infrastructure product, you rely on us to be fast and always available. And as an email service provider, we need to make sure that your email neighbors are sending emails of the absolute best quality. ESPs are unique in that they are only as good as the reputation and sending practices of their customers. A single bad actor can take down a good portion of an ESPs reputation, but it takes everyone as a whole to create an exceptional reputation over time. Which brings us to the reasons behind our new sign-up process.

From now on, we’re going to ask new customers a few extra questions. You can test the entire service internally, but we’ll hold off on letting new accounts send a ton of email, while a member of our team manually reviews the account to make sure that we’re all on the same page. We’ll be looking for companies that share the values of our current customers: sending only high-engagement, transactional emails, as a part of the infrastructure of their business. It’ll take us up to 24 hours to review all accounts (a little longer on weekends), but we’ll be completely transparent about it.

This new process will also help us get to know new customers better. We’ll be available by phone or email or chat to help you get set up and make sure your integration is effective. And, if you’re just discovering the value of separating your marketing and your application emails, we’ll be so happy to help you split things out and recommend providers for sending the other stuff.

Existing customers will see no disruption or change in how they use the product. If you’re currently sending with Postmark, we know you value the same things we do. This change will only ensure that we continue to provide the best email infrastructure possible for you.

Postmark is a product by Wildbit, a company that gets to play by its own rules. We’ve always been focused on providing high quality products, even if it meant we would grow slower. We believe it is better to offer an extremely good service for a smaller set of customers than a mediocre product for a large market. If we didn’t, we would have added bulk sending years ago and tripled our revenue. We decided that to really make Postmark exceptional for our customers, we needed to limit the product to customers who take email delivery just as seriously as we do. So we don’t mind growing slower if in return we are able to provide our amazing customers the best possible email infrastructure tool out there. Join us, it’s gonna be a great ride.